Funded by my paper-route
I was able to buy my first Victrola and Edison Standard
at a young age.

My father and I would
go to auctions and sometimes spent hours waiting to bid on a phonograph
with its morning-glory horn. We weren't very sophisticated buyers
and had limited funds so we unfortunately didn't pursue rare machines.
But it was always fun and there was alot of serendipity in our collecting.

I'm sure my mother
always wondered what we'd be bringing home after one of our outings.

Through the years
my interest in phonographs has taken some turns, from phonographs
(the pre-1920 machines and records) to toy phonographs and talking
toys to less space demanding phonograph ephemera (postcards, advertisements,
etc.).

Cultural questions
related to the phonograph and how it was marketed to the home have
always been of particular interest to me. But in truth its not that
simply and anything
connected with the phonograph seems to catch my attention.

Phonographia
(think memorabilia) was chosen as the name of this site because
it's meant to include anything that we might remember or associate
with the phonograph.

The Phonograph engraved
its history into records and was
literally a revolution of sound with records revolving at different
rpms and recreating its captured sound.

But again, it's ephemera
and sign-posts related to the history of the phonograph that are documented
in Phonographia.

Phonographia originated
in 2001 as an internet site
and an on-line scrapbook of phonograph memorabilia and it continues
to be a work-in-progress.

I have used some images
and links from the internet along with my own archive material so
if anyone sees something that is incorrect, please let me know as
my intent is to simply be a Friend of the Phonograph and tell
its story from my perspective.

Last year, two scientists presented a theory
in quantum mechanics that they called “entangled histories.” They
argue that the existence of a particle in space is fractured along
many alternate timelines, all of which must be considered to understand
the full chronology of its life cycle. It is baffling and exhilarating
in the way only quantum physics can be, but one idea stood out as
particularly resonant. Jordan Cotler, an author of the paper and a
graduate student at Stanford Univer­sity, has said, “Our best description
of the past is not a fixed chronology but multiple chronologies that
are intertwined with each other.” We’ve long known that this is how
human history works — an unimaginable number of small stories, compressed
into one big one. But maybe now we finally have the ability to record
and capture them all, and history can become something else entirely:
not a handful of voices, but a cacophony.